1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure relates in general to configuring storage systems, and more particularly to a method, apparatus and program storage device for providing virtual disk service hints based storage.
2. Description of Related Art
Managing storage complexity is a common problem for organizations of all sizes. Businesses have undergone dramatic increases in the amount of data that they manage and therefore require greater intelligence in storage resource provisioning and management. Storage administrators continue to examine ways to expand storage capacity and provide storage management using direct attached storage and networked storage solutions. However, business managers require storage administrators to provide solutions that deliver lower costs and improved efficiency. Effective storage management is key to ensuring these solutions.
Managing networked storage—particularly storage area networks (SANs)—makes fundamentally different demands on the administrator than does managing local (directly attached) storage. Direct attached storage (DAS) causes management headaches because storage resources are tied to the servers and the distribution of those resources is difficult. Networked storage, on the other hand, consolidates storage resources, which introduces a number of management issues around the area of shared storage, including determining what storage devices are attached to the network, access to devices, and routing for fault tolerance.
Although high-end single-vendor storage management solutions for enterprise-sized organizations have been on the market for some time, increasingly sophisticated storage management tools that are designed to work with storage devices from multiple vendors have been lacking for the small and midsize business. The development of such tools can ease the complexity of storage management tasks for all businesses seeking to implement networked storage solutions.
The Microsoft® Windows® Server™ 2003 and Microsoft® Windows® Storage Server 2003 introduced two storage infrastructures/services to allow storage administrators to manage complex storage configurations (including multi-vendor configurations) more effectively, thus helping to realize the business goal of highly available data at lower cost. In particular, the Windows Virtual Disk service (VDS) is designed to address problems with disk management. VDS is a core service new to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Storage Server 2003. The VDS infrastructure is designed to provide storage administrators with a single user interface for managing multi-vendor storage at the block level. VDS provides the infrastructure used to manage storage resources, such as disks and volumes, so that directly attached and networked storage resources can be “carved up” and made available for use. VDS allows an administrator in charge of different storage arrays to centrally pull in the management of these disparate arrays within a single Windows interface and allows for the scripting of storage management activities across heterogeneous storage platforms. With VDS, disk and volume management can be centralized and scripted, thus allowing those not skilled in the storage management software to still be able to perform storage tasks such as adding a new disk to the array.
The capabilities of hardware providers depend on the capabilities of the underlying storage hardware. Therefore, the degree to which each manufacturer implements the VDS API can vary. For instance, manufacturers can implement as many of the features that are defined in the VDS API as are necessary to optimize hardware configurations, monitor and dynamically tune performance, or automate fault management. However, the configuration of storage attributes expected by applications from storage sub-systems remains complex, i.e., binding physical storage into virtual storage often requires detailed knowledge of the storage architecture in order to make the correct decisions initial creation of the storage, and even more analysis and knowledge when attempting to correct performance or fault tolerance deficiencies. Without a common (and simple) means of presenting the correct requests to a storage array to accomplish this complex configuration, most hardware providers will tend to support such a limited subset of capabilities that it becomes impossible to properly utilize the full functionality of specific storage arrays.
It can be seen then that there is a need for a method, apparatus and program storage device for providing virtual disk service hints based storage.